The present invention relates to a folded box or carton set-up machine and more particularly to a simplified machine for setting up folded blanks of corrugated cartons.
In the past, machines of many kinds have been provided for opening containers which are manufactured and shipped in a knocked down or flattened state. In the knocked down shipping state, the four sides are permanently secured together and each side has a bottom flap thereon which is extended outwardly from side to side. Cartons are supplied from factories in this condition to conserve shipping space. However, in order to ready the boxes for loading, it is necessary to open the boxes by moving the sides apart until the adjacent sides are at right angles and then bending in the inside and outside bottom flaps to enclose the bottom. It is also necessary that the folded bottom flaps be glued or otherwise connected together prior to loading the boxes. It is still common in the art to see boxes of this type assembled by hand, utilizing many man-hours setting up each individual box by hand, and gluing or stapling the bottom together prior to loading. It is, of course, still economical to provide this function by hand when only a small number of boxes is involved; however, for assembling and loading large numbers of boxes, such as for production lines, and the like, it becomes desirable to reduce the number of man-hours and labor by going to systems automatically assembling or setting up boxes. Accordingly, many machines have been developed whose principle purpose is to automatically take folded cartons and assemble them. These machines usually have a feed mechanism for feeding flat or knocked down boxes from a stack one at a time, grasping opposite sides of the folded carton and lifting one away from the other to unfold the box, then folding the inside and outside flaps and ejecting the box from the machine. It has also been suggested to provide for automatic gluing of the bottom flaps of the box during the folding operation whereby the box, as ejected from the machine, is ready for loading. These prior art machines have not always been completely reliable in operation and have been frequently complex machines subject to break-downs and jammings, such as when blanks are fed to the machine of a slightly different shape or size than the machine is adapted to handle. Many of these prior art machines also have complex mechanisms for handling each step of the box folding operation and have complex feeding mechanisms to drive the blank from one station to the next along the machine. One advantage of the present invention is to provide a simplified box folding machine utilizing a simplified reciprocating mechanism for moving the carton from a magazine loaded with folded blanks to a set-up station and then in one continuous movement from the set-up station to the flap folding and gluing and to a flap compressing station. The next box in the cycle can then push the box in the compressing station out of the machine.